


Memento Mori

by SmexyWatermelon



Category: Prototype (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gentek, Gentek everywhere
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-04
Updated: 2017-01-08
Packaged: 2018-09-14 19:28:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9199346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SmexyWatermelon/pseuds/SmexyWatermelon
Summary: You had been working at Gentek for years, until Alex Mercer decided to screw up your job, your life and your future, using just a scalpel and a highly infective virus.-----Alex was one of the best, cunning characters the world ever got to know. I deeply profoundly soundly loved Prototype 1. And of course I hated the sequel, not just because the devs ignored a good plot and threw Heller at me as if he was a character as good as the original Alex – but mainly because Alex had turned from a charming subtle antihero to a cheap 4th class villain-who-blurts-out-his-plans with no apparent reason.I’m here to fix that. And for the fangirling part, of course.





	1. End or beginning?

**Author's Note:**

> Hi. This is a rage fueled rant from an old fangirl. I know it doesn’t count as much, but it’s my opinion. It’s been almost five years since that god awful Prototype sequel was released. AND I’m still pissed.  
> I noticed there’s a lack of ReaderxAlex fics, so I’m here mainly for that. But also to remind you people that -although the gameplay got better - the story of P2 does not make any sense compared to P1, and thus I came up with my own story to fix “Why alex became such a brainless jerk in the second game” and most importantly – the thing that IMO would have made for a fucktastic awesome sequel – what happened to Pariah – Greene’s kid – after the events of P2. I read just some of the comics and hate Heller from the bottom of my bottomless soul, so be prepared for it will show.  
> Enjoy

It was a rainy night: you silently listened to the water thudding gently outside of the building as you kept working in the lab at Gentek – of course you would have liked being home right now but when McMullen gave you an order it was unsafe to not follow it – normally it would have been just a stain on your pristine scientist career, but lately it had become something more and more threatening...  
You had heard about the rumors – about those Blackwatch guys, making scientists disappear from their homes in the middle of the night. You were hoping with all yourself that was just a rumor – God, it had to be. Many in your group had simply discarded it and had gone back to their duties – there was so much to do since your group leader had stopped showing up at work for four days in a row.

_Who knows what got to him this time…_

Mercer had always kind of been the wildcard, but he was also stubborn and hardworking. It was new he didn’t show up at the lab - he must have got badly ill or something, you kept telling yourself, but somehow you had a bad feeling about all of this.  
You lean again against the counter as you place the vial with the umpteenth virus mutation you had to examine: up to now, of the 14 strains Gentek had provided your team with, only one had been successfully identified and synthesized. Your superiors called it Blacklight; you called it mass murder weapon. Sure, Gentek wanted to use it to reproduce cells, create organs from thin air, cure more and more people with these overpowered staminal cells, all that heavenly godly crap they fed to the public. The truth was that this virus was dangerous, much more dangerous than anything you had ever seen, capable of reducing an animal to bones and dust in not much more than a couple of seconds.

You carefully open the vial, the thick gloves of your contamination suit making the task ten times more difficult, but a hundred safer. You take a little sample from it and put it on a petri dish, mechanically pushing it under the microscope: your eyes hurt in protest as you forced your head on top of it, your legs joining them in a chorus of tiredness, but you just ignored it and stared at the progress the virus had made during the day.  
As usual, at first there was nothing, and now – after barely a 12 hours explosion to some sick animal cells – the virus had grown and twisted, the cells now sane and swollen, moving around the petri glass and-

“Oh fucking almighty-” They were… eating each other. It’s not the right medical term, but it surely is the most appropriate: you had never seen something so fierce happen between just a couple of cells. You shivered at the thought of something like this happening on a bigger scale: you remember it was your job to partially prevent that kind of catastrophe and manage to get back some of your composure.  
You straighten back up, take in a deep breath, the realization that your life was now staring at what were supposedly two pieces of harmless flesh attempting to _swallow_ each other dawned on you, but you kicked it back from where it came and found the will to go on with your job.  
You take notes about the subject, your writing turns out shaky as you realize your hand had started trembling. You discard the pen and block notes on the counter with a sigh and grab your trembling hand with your other one, your fingers feeling funny on the plastic texture as the tip of your fingers moved down your palm and wrapped around your wrist. You were a nervous wreck and you knew it: it made no difference what doctor you saw or what pills they prescribed you, since the only real thing that you would have never given up on was the one stressing you so much.

The bad feeling you had in the guts just worsened when you heard the doors of the lab opening: another scientist entered the room; a man, judging from the broadness of his shoulders, but you couldn’t tell for sure, wrapped as he was in the protective garments.  
The man stares back at you behind the thick glass of the containment suit: his moves are uncertain, something that make you suspect him even more after hearing his voice and recognizing him. “(y/s)? What are you doing here?” he asks with a rough voice, clearly surprised to find you here.  
Mercer had never faltered in all the time you had known him. And it was a very long one.  
“Mercer? I thought you were sick.” He paces in front of you, the counter separating the two of you. “What the hell happened to you?” he takes his hand in the other, grabbing his knuckles. “I was helping my sister move in.” “Bullshit.” You immediately call him out on that one.  
His head snaps up to look at you, you could feel his glare even behind the visor.  
Maybe, if you were just another random greed-driven scientist, you would have let him be. But you were an old greed-driven acquaintance of his, and you knew enough to know when he was telling a lie.  
You sigh briefly, arms crossed on your chest, your head leans sideways before staring back at him: “What’s wrong with you? I never saw you skip so many days at work.” _I never saw you like this. I don’t like seeing you like this._  
You were pretty sure there was a tear in the pit of your eye: you stealthily shook your head to move it away and blamed it on the stress of the last few days, though deep inside you knew it was not it.

“It’s tough to explain, (y/n). Just let me do my work.” (y/n). You never addressed each other with your names.  
Something was clearly off with him, but you couldn’t quite put your finger on what it was: you simply kept staring as he paced past you towards the refrigerators, your eyes never leaving his back.

You two had met in college. You didn’t talk much to each other back then (well, not that now it was that much different) – you had always been the studious type, spending entire afternoons with your head buried in medicine books to prepare for your next exam, and he… he had always been the genius that seldom had to study, and whom everyone loved. You had a kind of geek-bully relationship at the time, though you were in college and the bully knew how advanced biochemistry worked.  
Actually, you were similar, under certain aspects: stubborn, raised in an orphanage, no one to look after but themselves. It felt right to try to be close to him. But it was also undoubtedly a huge mistake.  
After the degree you had spent some years studying in the same lab – it had got the two of you close, but not as close as you had hoped. With some hindsight, you were glad he wasn’t interested in you – it would have driven you crazy being in a relationship with that selfish bastard.

By the time Gentek hired you you had in mind only your job: not that it didn’t send a weird pang up your chest seeing him all tangled up with Karen, but you had known him for too long not to see what was happening. Karen was too satisfied with the accomplishment of becoming the research group leader’s fiancé to see that Alex was just using her for… something. Comfort, you supposed, although imagining Alex being lonely made him too… sensitive. Too human. Surely made you too sympathetic towards him.

You saw him closing the refrigerator door, a rack of vials tinkling with one another in his hands.  
“What are you doing with those vials? We still haven’t sampled them.” You pointed out, but he had the answer ready. “McMullen told me to get some of these to transport them to another lab.” “And why didn’t he ask me?” McMullen was the one that had told you to stay here for the night. It made no sense he contacted Alex for this, but as a response, he simply shrugs. “I don’t know, ask him.”  
Why was he lying? And _why were you noticing?_ He was generally really good at it…  
You blink several times behind the thick glass of your suit, unable to see Mercer’s face. “Alex? What’s going on?” you ask again, your voice betraying your worrisome as his body somehow stiffened even more. He paced near you and placed the vials on the counter. “You don’t look alright.” You place your hand on his forearm, squeezing gently “I know we’re not friends, but if something’s wrong…” you just hinted at it, and again thanked whoever invented those dumbass visors for being so good at hiding your tears. He wavered and looked towards you, his hands leaving the sides of the vial rack.  
You would have preferred seeing his face instead of staring at that mirror-like silver surface, you were generally good at reading faces, and for once you genuinely felt like you wanted to help him.

_You know you can tell me everything._

The sentence gets stuck in your throat, but your mind drifts back at that one time he had got drunk, when you had found him crying outside of the campus entrance, sitting on the cold marble stairs in the middle of the night. And when your overly-friendly character forced you to sit beside him and ask him what was wrong, he had just hugged you.  
Just like he was doing now. The oversized visors made everything more awkward, but you could feel his body heat seeping inside your suit, and he was so warm and inviting just like he had been on that lonely night so long ago - it looked like ages now, but you had always cherished the moment Alex Mercer had almost felt close to you.

His hand wraps around your back, keeping you close to him, his face leaning against your shoulder. You kept guessing what was going on with him, your mind racing to more and more improbable answers when a quick metal sound was heard echoing in the room and a warm pain oozed from your belly.  
You try to push yourself away from him with a pained whine, but the arm on your back keeps pushing you against him, as you gasped and screamed in pain and he groaned against the side of your neck.  
His hand had snapped on one of the scalpels laying on top of the counter and he had jabbed it in your stomach, making it sink halfway inside your body: the pain was excruciating, and you couldn’t fight back as he held you close to him. You coughed blood, your glass visor stained from the inside.  
“I’m sorry.” He gasped, voice broken. You moan in pain against his shoulder “I’m sorry I’m sorry-“ you think you heard a sob as he lets go of your body, watching as you collapsed on the ground holding the scalpel still inside your flesh; everything gets blurry and you just hear the clinking of the vials and the noise of his feet pacing away, the lab doors clunking close behind him.  
You’re gasping for air, feeling more blood creeping up your throat, staining your lips, the wet copper feeling invading your mouth, your eyes still wet.

You try to use your last forces to push yourself in a standing position and your hand reaches for the counter- but every time you try to lever yourself from the ground pain shoots from your stomach following your spine, making you fall back on the floor.  
Everything started feeling dizzy, and panic made you try harder and finally manage to push your hand a little farther; but when you’re about to pull yourself up the pain blinds you momentarily again and you fall back on the ground, dragging the microscope and the sample you were examining with you.  
You hear the glass shattering on the ground, the back of your head hits it as well and you feel dazed as death slowly creeps up your body, making you feel very hot and then more and more cold. The suit was now completely drenched in your blood, inside and outside.  
You gasp one last time before your eyes drift closed and your mind blacks out.

_“Alex… why…”_


	2. Hungry

Hot, blinding, pure light.

Someone is digging inside your body. You feel the instruments poking at flesh and organs, your groaning not bothering the ones at work around you.

“H-help-“ your voice is broken, fragile, like someone who hasn’t talked for days. Your body feels so hot you’re afraid you’re about to melt. Your chest is heavy, your skin is covered in sweat, and you don’t see a thing besides that light…  
You look up at one of the medics that was curing you, forcing your feeble voice to speak to him. “What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel like this?” No answer. You couldn’t see them, but you felt eyes staring at you. Breathing accelerating, blood thumping louder inside their blood vessels, feeling incredibly alien, incredibly close.

They leave after a while. You easily lose track of time, unable to sleep, waiting to die on that operating table.  
You cried whenever you were conscious, pleading to any god you knew to spare you from whatever the other scientists were planning. Most of the time, when you blacked out you didn’t see much. Sometimes, it was the old orphanage you grew up in. Sometimes, it was all your hopeless dreams, all the chances you had got to have an average life and a normal family that you had turned down.  
Other times, it was simply Alex stabbing you, his face twisting in a grin as he sunk the knife deeper inside your body.

A cold, plastic hand was placed on top of your forehead.  
“Just rest, (y/n).”  
A syringe slips inside your neck, making way through skin and tissue. At this point, you don’t even care what’s inside, you just want all of this to stop.

Your eyes stare at the blinding white light of the operation room, the shadow of your savior shifting out of your view as you slipped again in darkness.  
It was all quiet and peaceful in here. You sigh in relief, albeit you are barely conscious of what your body was doing.

_There’s a voice echoing. You’re not sure of what it said, or even if it was human, but it’s talking to you. It feels like ages since you’ve last spoken to someone.  
“H-hello?” you whisper, your tone just above a murmur.  
There’s a… pulse. Echoing in the darkness, bringing turmoil inside your brain, the feeling of your teeth vibrating inside your mouth as the voice spoke louder.  
You instinctively close your eyes, shield your ears with your palms. When you open them again, a familiar figure stands in front of you._

_Covered in a white overall, a pale face that has spent too much time inside a lab, blue eyes staring at you behind reading glasses.  
”A-alex?” He gazes at you, and then…smiles? You never saw him smiling like that. Well, not at people, that’s for sure. “Is that you?” your hand tentatively touches his chest, and his whole figure disappears in swirls of smoke._

_You hear a distant noise of glass shattering to the ground, screams in the distance, everything becomes redder as growls and snarls fill your ears.  
 **You were made for him.** _

“What! Who are you?!”  
You wake up drenched in cold sweat inside a cell, one of the many that had been built inside the facility. They were used for the animal test subjects, and that immediately made you fear for your safety: you suppress a yawn and drag your feet on the floor, letting your fingers trail on the cold surface, checking how your body was feeling.  
You look down as your hands caress your body now covered in a plastic-like suit, tightly wrapped around your figure and secured with many different buckles.

You touch the skin on your stomach, expecting to feel pain since… well, Mercer had stabbed you, right? If there’s a wound…

Nothing. You push harder, but there’s no pain, no anything, you’re not even bothered by the pressure applied by your hand at all.  
You lay back on the cot, one arm resting on your stomach and the other underneath your head, exhaling deeply. You were a rational person, you were sure you could figure out what had happened.

It could have been a coma. It could have been a new virus. It could have been a million things, but they all seemed too fantastic to be realistic.   
Maybe you had simply had a stress attack and imagined everything. That for sure sounded more plausible at least.

Frankly, the possibility you had just completely gone mad and was hospitalized in an asylum seemed something that could have likely happened, but you discarded that hypothesis for the moment and pretended what had happened with Alex wasn’t just a product of your imagination. You knew that you couldn’t question the bases else the whole castle crumbled down, but since nothing seemed to make really sense it was difficult to understand what was the starting point. It might have been a waste of time, but if you were really trapped inside an asylum time would have been one of the few things you had in abundancy.

You take in another deep breath: you were pleased to note you weren’t panicking as much as you thought you would have in this kind of situation. 

To begin with, you could have used recalling what had actually happened.  
A label came to your mind, you felt like you could almost see it closing your eyes.  
DX-1116. One of the previous failed versions of the pathogen.  
You had been examining it the other night, trying to figure out why Blacklight was synthesized from the successive samples and not from it. You saw it first-handedly what it could do, regenerating cells just as efficiently as its 1118 counterpart could.  
The fact is, it didn’t work on animals. It didn’t even kill them like 1118 did: it made them consume all their energies, all the subjects you had tested it with had died of starvation. In a cell-room full of food.  
Well, knowing what 1118 did to them, that was almost mercy compared to it.

You unpleasingly noted your stomach had started feeling weird: it was not really hunger, but more like you hadn’t eaten in a long while, though for the moment, you still felt fine.  
Besides, you noted, if that virus had accidentally entered your organism you would have already been long dead. It didn’t need as much incubation as DX-1118, the problem you and the rest of the team had never solved being it was too fast: there was no way a human being would have been able to sustain themselves for more than a few hours before collapsing on the ground, dead.

You puff, knowing that you couldn’t know anything about the virus for sure. You decide to keep recalling pieces, hoping to find the answer for all of this. You remember blacking out: after that, you weren’t sure what had actually happened. Part of you briefly wondered what had happened to Mercer, but you shushed that thought away since you had no time to worry about that self-centered hypocritical murderer.  
If you had been infected – thing that was highly likely – you should have been dead. But after all, you were in the hands of your team: they knew the virus strain flaws, maybe they had managed to synthesize something from Blacklight using your notes.

You exhale deeply again, not even an inch closer to the truth than when you had started this. At least you were still breathing, though your empty stomach had just started protesting louder.

After some time, an attendant came with food: he passed the dish inside your cell through a little opening with two doors, made to be able to be opened just with one door at a time to prevent the subjects from escaping and contaminating the rest of the facility.  
He brought food many times, and you always returned the dishes empty, the sense of void inside of you growing a bit with each meal you finished. After a while you lost count, though it didn’t seem like much time had passed and yet you were still hungry no matter how much they fed you.  
You had come to the point of crouching in a corner, knees against your chest and arms wrapped around your legs, teeth lightly grazing against your suit, trying to ignore that horrible sensation as you waited.

With the passing of the time, hunger just intensified. It was difficult telling how much time passed from one meal to the other, since you had no clocks to look at, but it was always useless: they never sated you, you always ended up craving for more.

You cradled in the cot, legs against your chest and head resting on the wall. You tried closing your eyes many times, knowing you had to sleep but were seemingly unable to.  
You thought you had heard something and raised your head to check, but nothing was happening inside the room. You assume your previous position again, and as you hear that strange noise one more time you close your eyes, this time looking as the darkness spread again in your sight – or whatever that was. You didn’t know how to call it since you weren’t actually ‘seeing’ it and you were pretty sure you weren’t imagining it – that was still assuming that you hadn’t gone mad.

It was… appealing. Like listening to a whale silently singing to the oceans.  
A thousand voices chanted one, single, beautiful and terrifying word.  
“Mother.”

_**My child.** _

_Now you can hear it more clearly: it’s a female voice, so elegant, so powerful.  
You tilt your head to the side – incredibly – more curious than scared. Actually, you realized you weren’t afraid at all. “What’s going on? Who are you?”  
 **These things are none of your concern, my darling.**  
“Why did you just call me child?”  
 **We have much in common. You, of all the things they have created, are the one that can understand most.**  
“Understand? How can I understand if I don’t even know what you’re talking about?”  
 **You simply have to do one thing…**  
Something leans on you: you have a flash of tattered skin, scattered bodies, and as you stare at them, sharp green eyes stare back.  
 **Wake up, my dear.**  
_

“Miss (y/s)?” you tiredly bat your eyelashes: you had never seen that man before, nor the pack of black soldiers following him. He looks anxious and displeased, and you realize he might have been calling you for a while.

The door of your cell opens, and he smiles as the soldiers aim their rifles at you.  
“Follow me.”  
You stand up from your bed, hesitant steps as you stare back at him.

It’s not like you have a choice.

You look at your reflection in the glasses as you walk in the long corridors, following the doctor: you looked like the day Mercer had stabbed you, although your hair had started assuming a strange hue; it’s not like the color had changed, but you could swear there was a slight blood red tint added to it.

You stop in front of a room: inside, there’s only a weird looking chair, full of needles and medical machinery; on the side, you could spot a looking glass. To be fair, you could see even the people behind them. Some were coworkers, some weren’t. Some were simply soldiers.  
“Could you please sit here?” the little man says with an affable smile, but you see the slight trembling of his face, the pulse madly beating under his skin.

You look down at the chair, your lashes caressing your cheeks. “I don’t want to.” Your eyes snap back to the scientist standing in front of you, sweat beading on his forehead.

“Please, ma’am.” The soldier on your left says. You look at him: albeit he seemed calm, his heart was racing, pupils dilating, thinking about something good, probably something important that he thought he was about to lose if you decided not to cooperate.  
You didn’t want to die. You had to obey them, although something in you spurred you not to.  
You let them bind you, studying them as they did so. You could tell so many more things about them, from their behavior, from their body language, even from their smell. It was not something normal people did.

They make some routine tests, then suddenly the scientist gives a look to the soldiers that could only mean danger: he types commands on one of the many keyboard and when he’s finished you feel something poking at your back, pressing insistently through the suit.  
As the needles dig inside your spine, the excruciating pain blinds you for a moment and you call again for that soothing voice, hoping she could aid you.  
You don’t know how it happened: it was like you were witnessing the scene, as you ripped their special chair apart simply by standing up.

Shots are fired, bullets digging in your flesh, commands shouted in what sounded like another language.  
High pitched noises fill your ears as you fall on your knees and then on your side, resting on the ground: everything was cold again, just like when Alex had left you in the lab.  
Then, something warm approaches: the man must have been a couple of feet away from you, but before you realize it you have stood up, closed the gap and snapped his neck at an inhuman speed, and then the cold was gone, just like the man that had disappeared in thin air, and the hunger was finally starting to give in.  
The other soldier tries to hit you with the back of his rifle, but you dodge by leaning in the opposite direction, something from the back of your mind telling you exactly where punching would have hurt him more.

To your own surprise, you saw what happened to the soldier this time: thin black metal like liquid branches erupted from your body, grabbing the screaming man and dragging him inside of you, making him disappear inside your stomach, the hunger fading a bit before returning stronger, followed by a chorus of screams and emotions you thought you wouldn’t have felt ever again. Unluckily, they all screamed for death.

You open your eyes again: you hadn’t realized you had closed them, nor you had grabbed the sides of your head with both hands. As you look down, you realize your palms are covered in blood, and as a strand of your hair falls in front of your eyes, you realize you hadn’t imagined them changing color.  
The lead scientist is speaking pressed against the intercom, his head turning madly to you and the device, muttering mostly incoherent sentences.  
People from the outside must have sealed the room, leaving you and him inside.

He gasps when he sees you looking at him and then groaning in pain while grabbing your stomach, a gesture you did out of human habit since hunger was now something akin to a feeling that spread and screeched through your whole body.  
“Sedate her, sedate her! Quick!” “It’s already at maximum, we can do nothing!!”  
“I’m sorry… really… but…” the man pushes his body against the door, clearly terrified. Sorry was not the right word. Maybe it was empathy, maybe condescension, you couldn’t really tell anymore.  
You would have felt something for what you were going to do hadn’t all your emotions been driven away by something much more powerful.

Jaw trembling, eyes fixed on your prey, you lick your lips in anticipation, and the man screams louder in horror.  
“I’m… starving.”


End file.
